Independent Project Two

Independent Project Two

For my second personal project I decided to adapt and finalise projects that I have previously been working on in my spare time. The three main subjects for exploration were:

Ismail the Mouse

Grand Parade

Shadowboy Revisited.

 

Underneath my kitchen sink there lives a mouse in an old tuna can. He told me that he has come from a dangerous place and that his journey was long and perilous.

Roughs

He doesn’t speak English very well so I drew his journey the best I can. He is worried that people will be afraid of him because to them he is a strange little creature from a dangerous place….we will have to wait and see.

front-cover-text-psdpage-2-text-psdpage-3-textpage-4

Over the course of the summer I started working on this idea of a silent comic. Condensed into four pages I illustrated the journey of this mouse and the world he had left behind. I used one Prussian Blue pencil and a discarded sketch pad that I found in the studio at the end of last year. The story is that of Ismail the mouse who had to leave his country because of dangerous forces only to arrive in a city only to be considered as the dangerous one.

Final Outcome

Finished Book

Reflection:

Of all the projects I decided to attempt this was the closet I got to a finalised product, however feedback has suggested that it is too subtle to be a silent comic and needs captions to further illustrate the story.

As part of a sequential study I feel that the narrative reads quite well, if time is spent studying the images, and the overall effect is a stylised and interesting piece of work. There were many suggestions regarding where the story should go and I feel confident that this narrative could carry forward into a final conclusion.

Grand Parade

I started a field project of documenting Grand Parade. Throughout the term for 2-3 hours a week  I continued this illustrative exercise using a sketchbook made in Book Arts last year.  I started from Market Street gradually working down to Edward Street which is where I finished by the end of Semester One. My intention is to continue until my second year is complete.

Grand Parade is perhaps one of the last streets to be gentrified in Brighton. There is a stark contrast to the Parade. Below we have the seedy and dirty street yet when we look up there is the majesty of the Edwardian and Victorian vistas.

 Start 3rd October 2016

Development

Production of Artwork

Creating a product out of the original artwork was complex. The entire work ran a length of 15 feet when laid out as one piece of work. I had to devise a way of creating a book that did not compromise the integrity of the work and also presented the street as I had intended, which was as one continuous parade.

I scanned in the original sketches into Photoshop and made several master-files that could then be imported into Indesign and then constructed into a layout design that could then be made into a book. Once this was completed I then created a small dummy to test the folds of the pages so it could then be pulled out as one piece of work.

 

           

                           

Creating a Masterfile

The masterfiles were complied into Photoshop as one continuous piece of work. Each one consisted of splits where the sketch book had been scanned in. I then had to re align the artwork so the joins could not be seen. I then tried to make the folds of the book align with this aspect so it wouldn’t be too noticeable in the final product.

Several attempts were made at trying to get this part of the project correct.

Title Page

In addition to the work I also considered the front book cover. As a reflection of the project I titled it BN2 after the postcode of the street. Within the type I placed an extract of the work, which I would spell out the title. I printed the cover in book cloth and on separate card mounted the final book together.

Finished Book

Reflection

This was one of the most challenging projects I decided to do. The production of the book was very complex and because of the size of the artwork it was easy to make several errors whilst manufacturing the final outcome. I was disappointed at the quality of print, which was due to my not knowing that Indesign reverts files to RGB rather than CYMK. This was why the final product has a slight blue tint to the ink. This was not my original intention, and as a consequence I would like to reprint and re-construct the project to a more finalised outcome.

 

Shadowboy

Development from sketches

My aim was to re create this narrative into a more cohesive product. I started by touching up all the original drawings from concept layouts to the final artwork. There was a total of 33 drawings to re-render.

These are process shots of the work undertaken. Each step required spending considerable time in mastering all the originals. I then utilising the work done so far into a contact sheet. This enabled me to review the story and pick out any inconsistencies that may have been overlooked in the original concept drawings.

The following is an example of the contact sheet I created.

 

Book Layout

  

Reflection

The final result of this of my project was not an overall success. The type font used was not appropriate for the story and the layout lacked any drama. There were several errors I made as part of production and the final result lacks the quality I had intended.